I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I'm starting to wonder if Google Analytics is some kind of covert 'psy op' to hold down small businesses.
I’m only slightly joking when I say this ... because Google Analytics is inherently bad - it does what it says on the tin, and it’s free - but because the sheer abundance of metrics available can overwhelm, distract, and encourage business owners and marketing teams to obsess over numbers that have, at best, marginal impact.
If I filled two jars with dollar coins - one for every time a client or prospect has agonised over their bounce rate, time on site, or event count (bearing in mind most of the time the event count tracking isn't set up right at this point in the conversation) and the other for every time the conversation began with how well-known their brand is in the market, or frequently their brand is searched versus competitors - I’d be eating steak dinners all week from the first jar, and lucky to afford something off the McDonald’s value menu from the second.
The fundamental issue isn’t that Google Analytics provides all this data - it’s that its accessibility makes it an easy substitute for asking far more important questions. And because you can see "results" (even if they aren't all that critical) more quickly with Google Analytics, it gives you that hit of feeling like things are being achieved
Metrics and measures that relate to your brand's relative strength and position in the market are typically more important - but because those are harder to measure - and may require thinking beyond the comfort of dashboards - many businesses, especially smaller ones, default to what’s easy to see and measure rather than what truly matters.
There must be some real (negative) impact from all this misplaced focus that obsessing over GA metrics brings.